Joshua Van Tassel is a Toronto-based, Juno-nominated composer, producer and sound maker. He has released a new album called Dance Music volume II: More Songs for Slow Motion which features The Venuti String Quartet. According to the press release, Like the instrument that inspired it, the Ondes Martenot, Van Tassel’s Dance Music volume II is elegant and expressive, the score to a movie inside your head.
The Ondes Martenot (OHND mar-tə-NOH) is an elegantly intricate, deliberately complicated hand-built machine that lives with the theremin as one of the world’s earliest electronic instruments (c.1928). Its inventor, the cellist Maurice Martenot, was a radio operator in WWI and wanted to duplicate the accidental overlaps of tones between radio oscillators, but with the expressiveness and emotion of cello. The Ondes is a rare collectible now, but there is an option in the Ondea: Itself an exclusive membership, they’re Ondes modernized by Calgary’s David Kean.
Watch the new video for the track “Shadows Smile For You”.